Citizens on the Shop Floor: Negotiating Class,Citizenship and National Identity in a Turkish State Factory

ABSTRACT

This paper examines discourses on citizenship and nation at shop floor level through Bak?rköy Cloth Factory – a state-owned factory in Istanbul, Turkey. Founded as a private enterprise in 1850, Bak?rköy became the State Industrial Office’s property in 1932 and of Sümerbank, the young Turkish state’s bank and industrial holding company in charge of textile production in 1933. Having survived such a drastic regime change, the factory’s first two decades under Sümerbank were shaped by the ruling classes’ zealous and simultaneous efforts of nation-building and industrialization. In the ruling classes’ popular projection, the alleged conversion of an unproductive industrial relic of the imperial past into an example of Republican hard work and patriotism provided opportunities for workers to repay their debt to the nation and its forefathers. In the context of the displacement and mediation of class conflict via nationalist discourses, this study explores how this industrial national space became the site of discursive struggles on national belonging and citizenship. Material from parliamentary debates and media coverage is linked with workers’ files to offer a micro-historical perspective on the interactions between class and nation.     

我国城市外来人口犯罪问题

随着我国经济的发展和城乡经济发展不均衡的扩大,城市外来人口日趋增多,随之而来的是外来人口犯罪问题日趋严重。通过对目前城市外来人口犯罪特点和原因的分析,可以寻求有效地控制和减少外来人口犯罪的对策。     

From Porto Rico to Puerto Rico: Citizenship,Race and the Politics of Worthiness

The English-language text of the 1898 Treaty of Paris, the accord conceding Puerto Rico to the United States, misspelled the island's name as Porto Rico. The treaty's ratification entrenched the error in US law and prompted a decades-long campaign to restore the territory's original name. More than a comedy of errors, this incident exposes conflicting interpretations of US citizenship and the worthiness of different sets of citizens. Puerto Ricans discovered that the statutory citizenship they acquired was attenuated by their perceived worthiness: a status limited by their membership of the so-called Spanish race.     

Postcolonial strangers in a cosmopolitan world: hybridity and citizenship in the Franco-Maghrebian borderland

Current critical theorizations within citizenship studies on the condition of migrants and refugees celebrate the nomadic dimension of the contemporary migrant/refugee figure and assign her the potential to disrupt hegemonic practices of capital and state-centric citizenship. However, such enthusiastic accounts need to exercise a sense of caution in conceptualizing the fragile and unstable condition of the migrant, and need to distinguish between various experiences of mobility, hybridity, and citizenship. Such a differentiation between these different lived experiences of citizenship echoes Aihwa Ong's critique of the ‘unified moralism attached to subaltern subjects [that] now also clings to diasporan ones, who are invariably assumed to be members of oppressed classes and therefore constitutionally opposed to capitalism and state power’. My analysis points to how class, race and language structure various experiences of mobility and citizenship and make tenuous easy celebrations of postcolonial hybridity within critical re-configurations of citizenship. I argue that practices of postcolonial mobility in the Franco-Maghrebian context have produced differentiated and unequal hybridities, and, consequently, asymmetrical experiences of citizenship. By distinguishing between various practices of mobility and hybridity, I indicate that postcolonial hybridity can also be employed to re-constitute the rigid boundaries of nation and citizenship.     

The cost of belonging: exploring class and citizenship in Soweto's water war

More than a decade since the dawn of democracy, South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world. Civil and political citizenship may have – rhetorically at least – reduced the stark racial inequality in the relationship between citizen and state evident under apartheid. Some authors suggest a positive correlation between social citizenship and social equality. However, in post-apartheid South Africa, deep socio-economic inequalities continue to mar the democratic content of society. Although rights to welfare and social services are nominally in place and are enshrined in the constitution, scores of poor, black South Africans are unable to claim social citizenship, precisely as a result of their class position. Using, as a lens, community struggles in Soweto against the commodification of water, this article seeks to explore the relationship between citizenship and class. It does this by addressing the relationship between the state and its citizens within the context of service delivery, paying particular attention to the impact of prepaid water meters and to the strategies that were employed by community movements in Soweto's ‘water war’. The key argument is that under the system of capitalism, class inequality will persist regardless of the extent of citizenship.     

In space no one can see you waving your hands: making citizenship meaningful to Deaf worlds

This article suggests that there is an underlying social contract that defines relationships between deaf and hearing people and which ultimately influences state provisions as well as society's perception of Deaf people. It is outdated and does not have the consent of Deaf communities. It will be argued that any renegotiation of the social contract needs to take into consideration a number of ‘elements’ that would be the context for that negotiation. Deaf citizens are marginalised in society largely due to a citizenship that assumes an idealised individual as a speaking and hearing citizen, with a social policy constructed and made in the image of hearing culture, that is rooted in a philosophy of favouring by default the instruction of deaf children via oral means in overwhelming mainstream education. These state policies have resulted in an entrenched social exclusion of Deaf people. Citizenship is recognised as an inclusive and momentum concept and therefore this situation is not unchangeable. A renegotiation of the social contract may require a form of group rights which nevertheless recognises the transnational nature of Deaf communities. As part of that process it will be necessary for Deaf people to obtain control over how their communities are run and resources allocated. That would entail the withering away of hearing control in a social policy context within Deaf spheres of influence. The new social contract would aim not for a paternal citizenship, but an empowering and Deaf-led one.     

Talcott Parsons on full citizenship for African Americans: retrospective interpretation and evaluation

In this essay in the Thinking Citizenship Series, Lidz evaluates the contributions of Talcott Parsons for thinking about citizenship and race relations in twentieth century America.     

‘Men are not born fit for citizenship,but must be made so’: Spinoza and citizenship

The modern conception of citizenship contains often unacknowledged key background assumptions – about the role of rights in citizenship, about the citizen modelled on a liberal autonomous and rational individual, and about the equality of citizens within a democratic state. Spinoza's political works give us a useful perspective on the historicity of these assumptions. Whereas the modern conception is abstract, universalist, and depoliticised, Spinoza's sense of the citizen's belonging is adamantly specific, particularist, and political, and offers a way forward for rethinking citizenship. The key concepts of freedom and republicanism are analysed, and a political reading is developed of Spinoza's view of citizenship in terms of a way of conducting politics.